The following area descriptions outline our research that we conduct with our collaborators and our industry partners. In typcial cases we conduct empirical studies in software development-oriented organizations and evaluate prototypes, that have been developed by our group.

1. Foundations and theory of collective intelligence systems

What are the underlying principles of and mechanism which let socio-technical collective intelligence systems work in the way they do? How can we support software architects and system designers in their planning and decision-making efforst to invent and extend CIS that support the individual user's tasks and the organization-wide processes alike. This research line also collects and synthesizes knowledge from multiple research fields like software architecture, multi-agent systems, computer-supported cooperative work, coordination theory, social computing and value-based approaches.

Research topics of interest include:

• Software architectural Principles and Patterns of CIS
• Systematics and Taxonomy of CIS
• Design and architectural descision-making of CIS and Crowd-Powered Systems

2. Using collective intelligence systems to solve complex problems in organizations

Organizations have adopted various kinds of collaborative and social software systems in order to support their business processes. Although there has never been a wider selection of systems to choose from, organization still struggle to integrate and disseminate the distributed knowledge and information of their employees and project artifacts. In order to "rewire" an organizations brain a key aspect is how to link different systems together so that they effectively support the life-cycle and processes of business-critical artifacts and stakeholders.

Research topics of interest include:

• Knowledge sharing in multi-disciplinary organizations
• Ecosystems and Multi-Sided Platforms
• Supporting Organizational Architectures through Software Architectures

3. Collective intelligence in software engineering (CISE)

Software Engineering has become highly dependent on self-organizational, collaborative platforms like bug/issue trackers, Q&A sites, project sharing platforms, app stores and extension markets. These systems have demonstrated significant positive impact across all levels of a development organization. In CISE we investigate how we can systeamtically extend CIS to other phases / abstraction levels in the software development process in order to support software developers and teams to be more efficient and effective. We work across all granularity levels starting from very small on code and model level up to very large like software ecosystems.

Research topics of interest include:

• Ad-hoc reuse and opportunistic program construction
• Bottom-up architectural evolution in software ecosystems
• Collective quality improvemenent of software artifacts
• Engineering methods for CIS